Claire Jussel is a poet, writer, and artist from Boise, Idaho. Her work has appeared in West Trade Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Wizards in Space, and Split Rock Review. She currently resides in Ames, Iowa and is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing and Environment program at Iowa State University. Her previous places of work and fascination have included bookselling at Wild Rumpus in Minneapolis, park-rangering in Wyoming, and occasional lighthouse keeping.
You can read her poem Invocations for Portals in the October 2023 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
Invocation for Portals emerged out of a sense of homesickness, or rather the desire to move between home places in a time when I was trying to understand what home meant after leaving school. This poem was an attempt to conjure up some childhood-backyard-style magic to locate through lines between these various homes. It is a bittersweet delight that this poem is making its way into the wider world some years after it was written, as I have now made yet another home place miles away from where this poem was born, surrounded by a different set of dear ones and geographic resonances.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
In my mind, poetry is already very close to invocations, conjuring, and spellcasting just by the nature of the intentional words and careful attention of the form. Poetry allowed me to approach this piece with associative flexibility, porousness, and meaning-making through gathering—all of which were ultimately essential for shaping this piece.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
I am going to cheat here and offer you a collection and a single poem by two different authors, both of whom have written many of the poems that have become touchstones for me: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay; Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limón
What are you working on now?
I am currently in my second year of the MFA Creative Writing & Environment program at Iowa State University, so among other things I am currently working on getting my finger on the pulse of what my thesis collection of poems might be. In the process of doing so I am writing and contemplating seasons; kinship, embodiment, and movement with and within place, and (for reasons that I have yet to fully understand, but because they keep on appearing in my poems) birds.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
For me, a poem often begins with observation, with a noticing, image, or sensation that sparks and lingers longer in my mind. These are often the seeds that start me down the path of a poem, even if it diverges from that starting point into something else entirely. It can sometimes be hard to let go of…